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The Going Rate for Lying

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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It would be nice to think that Denver Regional Transit District (RTD) General Manager Cal Marsella is feeling pangs of guilt for lying to the public so often about the virtues of rail transit. That would explain why, even though he is one of the highest-paid public officials in Colorado, he just announced that he is quitting that job to take the “opportunity of a lifetime” by going to work for a private company that operates buses (update:and would like to operate trains) for public agencies including (by an amazing coincidence) RTD.

One reason why transit officials like trains is that the top officials of rail transit agencies get paid more than the leaders of agencies that only run buses.

In 1995, RTD paid Marsella $112,000 to run RTD, which was then mostly a bus system. He was picked for the job partly because he and the then-chair of RTD’s board of directors, Jon Caldara, agreed that rail transit was a waste of money.

Within a few years, he had changed his tune, overseeing construction of two new light-rail lines and pumping interest groups for their support for a 2004 measure to raise taxes to build six more.

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Obama’s Painful Plans

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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Ron Utt, the Antiplanner’s faithful ally, has uncovered the first steps of President Obama’s plan to force smart growth on those parts of the country that managed to escape the housing bubble. The departments of Transportation and Housing & Urban Development have signed a joint agreement to impose smart growth on the entire nation.

Under the agreement, the departments will “have every major metropolitan area in the country conduct integrated housing, transportation, and land use planning and investment in the next four years.” Of course, nearly all of the metropolitan areas that already did such integrated planning suffered housing bubbles, while most of those that did not did not have bubbles. The effect of Obama’s plan will be to make the next housing bubble much worse than the one that caused the current financial crisis.

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Obama’s Recycled Moderate-Speed Rail Plan

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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The Obama administration believes in recycling, as shown by the so-called high-speed rail plan it announced last week. Below is a map of the plan, and below that is a map of the Federal Railroad Administration’s 2005 high-speed rail plan. As you can see, the proposed routes are identical. (The grey lines on the first map represent conventional Amtrak trains.)

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New FTA Head

By | | News commentary, Transportation
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President Obama continues his policy of bringing “change” to Washington by appointing Washington insiders to key posts in his administration. One such insider is Peter Rogoff, who will be the new head of the Federal Transit Administration (FTA).

As a staff member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Rogoff had a hand in writing ISTEA, TEA-21, and SAFETEA-LU, the 1991, 1998, and 2005 reauthorizations of federal transportation funding. He has also promoted high-speed rail, light rail, and bus-rapid transit systems. Naturally, the American Public Transportation Association — the nation’s transit lobby — is elated to have in Rogoff in charge of federal transit programs, as he knows all the strings to pull to get big bucks for their tiny constituency (meaning, for the most part, transit contractors, not transit riders).

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Planners Put Themselves Out of Business

By | | City planning, News commentary
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Cheerful news amid the gloom! The economy has tanked so badly that the city of Petaluma, California, is thinking of shutting down its planning department.

As readers of The Best-Laid Plans know, Petaluma was the first city in the country to try to control its growth by limiting the number of building permits issued each year. Curiously, though, the city’s planning department is funded out of developer fees. That’s okay as long as some development is going on, but now there is next to none.

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I wonder if the planners realize how ironic this is? Probably not.

Reports of the Death of the Suburbs Are Premature

By | | News commentary, Regional planning
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“The American suburb as we know it is dying,” says Time magazine. They are going to turn into the next slums, says the Atlantic Monthly. Both articles cite research by a planning professor named Arthur Nelson, who claims that by 2025 the U.S. will have 22 million “surplus” homes on large (over 1/6th acre) lots.

Nelson supposedly calculates this in a 2006 paper published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). Table 4 in the paper says that 38 percent of Americans prefer multi-family housing, 37 percent prefer homes on small (less than one-sixth acre) lots, and only 25 percent prefer homes on large lots. A note to the table says it “is based on interpretations of surveys by Myers and Gearin (2001).”

Those turn out to be rather loose interpretations. The Myers and Gearin paper includes the following quotes and summaries of public surveys:

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No Joy for Smart Land

By | | News commentary
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It’s official. Not only is Portland the most depressed major urban area in the U.S. (measured using such criteria as sales of anti-depressants), Oregon is the unhappiest state (measured using more conventional criteria such as unemployment and foreclosure rates). Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 are Florida, California, Nevada, and Rhode Island, all states with smart-growth laws (or, in the case of Nevada, federal limits on urban expansion).

Meanwhile, the happiest states are Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Hawaii, and Louisiana. All but Hawaii have no smart growth laws. How did Hawaii rank so high despite having the nation’s oldest growth-management law? A flip answer is that it would be hard to live in Hawaii and be unhappy, but it seems the real answer is that Hawaii has the lowest “non-mortgage debt as a percent of annual income.” Perhaps this is simply because there are a lot of rich people in Hawaii.
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Michigan and Ohio are pretty unhappy, but that can be credited to the decline in the auto industry. These lists really aren’t very meaningful, but the underlying data are. They show a pretty strong correlation between smart growth and foreclosure rates, and a moderately high correlation between smart growth and unemployment.

Job Sprawl? Horrors!

By | | News commentary
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The Brookings Institute just discovered the jobs are moving to the suburbs along with people. According to their press release, this decades-old trend “undermines long-term regional [and] national prosperity.”

“Allowing jobs to shift away from city centers hurts economic productivity, creates unsustainable and energy inefficient development, and limits access to underemployed workers,” says Brookings senior fellow Robert Puentes. But neither he nor the author of the study, Elizabeth Kneebone, actually proves that any of these things will happen — or how we’ve managed to survive for so long in the face of this adversity.

The study itself uses the curious procedure of measuring changes in job numbers within three miles, three to ten miles, and outside of ten miles of downtown. That would be fine if all metro areas covered the same geographic area, but the urban areas reviewed by Brookings ranged from Atlanta, which covers 2,000 square miles, to Trenton, which covered less than 100 square miles in 2000.

Not surprisingly, Trenton was found to have a lot less job sprawl than Atlanta. “The larger the metro area,” the study insightfully observed, “the more likely people are to work more than 10 miles away from downtown.” Well, duh.

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Portland City Commissioners Are Insane

By | | News commentary, Urban areas
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There can be no doubt about it: the city of Portland is run by a bunch of nutcases. Well, the Antiplanner knew that long ago, but they keep getting nutsier and nutsier all the time.

Flickr photo by p medved.

The latest is that Commissioner Randy Leonard wants to spend $500,000 to condemn and take over operation of a historic sign. If you’ve ever driven to downtown Portland from the east side, you’ve seen the sign: it has a deer on it jumping through an outline map of Oregon.

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Time and The New York Times Get It Wrong

By | | News commentary, Planning Disasters
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Writers for both Time and The New York Times have recently pontificated on the need to rebuild American cities so as to stop “sprawl.” The authors of these articles completely fail to understand recent housing markets and urban trends.

Writer Bryan Walsh, who has previously written on environmental issues for Time, claims that “The American suburb as we know it is dying,” which is a good thing because the suburbs “left our nation addicted to cars.” (Which, of course, is backwards: cars allowed more people to live in the suburbs.)

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